Unveiled last week at London’s National Portrait Gallery, a oversize portrait of Dame Maggie Smith seeks to capture the woman beneath the layers of petticoats. Forty-two-year-old artist James Lloyd, onetime winner of the prestigious BP Portrait Award, told VF Daily that the decision to portray Smith in both casual dress and posture “came from her. . . . I was painting her, not her as a character. We all imagine her as a character in period pieces, especially now, but I just went with my vision. I asked her to turn up in everyday attire, and she told me she was very much open to being directed.” Even if she ultimately pitied the director: during the initial meeting with the artist, Smith’s first words were reportedly “poor you.”

The Academy Award–winning actress has been previously immortalized in a range of artistic mediums, but Lloyd chose to begin the process with only his vision in mind: “I didn’t look at any other portraits. I did look at photography of her towards the middle when I was struggling with her face, but that was all.”

Perhaps the most poignant example of a thorny response to the representation of a public figure is that of Paul Emsley’s Duchess of Cambridge portrait earlier this year, so vicious Emsley described it as a “witch hunt.” “Everyone has a very particular view,” Lloyd told us carefully, of the response to Duchess Kate’s rendering. “There’s a public idea of the person, and whoever painted the Duchess of Cambridge . . . there were going to be a lot of opinions on it.” (Lloyd may have his own feedback to contend with: stateside, while Vulture called the evocation “perfect,” Gawker dubbed her a “condescending mummy overlord.”

“I am confident in what I’m doing. It’s not just her sitting there looking a bit bored—she has a very particular look,” Lloyd says of his choices. “Although she was quite everyday in her dress, she’s grand as well. She’s a big figure, and she should have a certain grandeur.”

Although perhaps a less contentious subject than Kate, Smith presented her own challenges: given her schedule, there were often long breaks between the sittings, and given her career, she’d occasionally arrive with an altered appearance. “At one point she came in with dyed blonde hair,” he told us. (Smith went blonde while filming Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet.)